[Harper's Kitchen] Today's Special: Mangel-Wurzel

[kniteracy]

[Harper's Kitchen] Today's Special: Mangel-Wurzel

But first, a reading from the book of Tom Robbins, Volume Four, Jitterbug Perfume.

Today's Special
The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish admittedly ,is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . .

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the ark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon tot he Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is a mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t----.

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy; commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole--and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)

An old Ukranian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil."

That is a risk we have to take.
Jitterbug perfume, Tom Robbins, 1984

Organic Vegetable Boxes
For the last couple of weeks, I've had my Tesco grocery delivery include an organic vegetable box. I guess I first heard about these on LiveJournal, and when I saw that Tesco would deliver one, full of veggies both common and exotic, to my door for not very much money, I added one to the last weekly shopping order. It was so much fun to sift through the variety of vegetables inside the box and plan the week's menus around those vegetables. It was like a game, and the best part about it was that we had totally fresh vegetables for a whole week, and it was great.. The first box contained bitter lettuce, potatoes, onions, carrots, pears, apples, celery, fennel and beets. We liked it so much we have gotten another one for this week.

Now, I have always loved pickled beets, which is the most common way they're sold and served in the US where I grew up. I recall going to an Italian restaurant called Provino's with caomhan when we were in college and actually having to negotiate over the beets in our shared salad. Beets, however, are not normally seen in US grocery stores, at least not where I used to live.

The organic veggie box packing list said you could roast beets with meats just as you might roast potatoes, so I decided to try that with the chicken breast I was roasting one evening. However, just before I got everything ready to go into the oven, I got a confirmation from aunty_marion that she'd be coming over for dinner. Plans had to change: AM dislikes beets intensely. So I swapped them out of the roasting pan and into the refrigerator, to be dealt with another time.

The Saturday Afternoon Grocery Order
By the end of the week, we'd used up nearly all our organic veggies, except for half a bunch of celery (which is no longer crisp but might do in a chicken soup) and the beets. So as I was making the grocery order yesterday, I decided that I needed to justify that money by making sure I cooked the beets last night, since we were expecting another bunch of beets in the next grocery order.

When the cook's education is lacking....
...the cook hies herself onto the World Wide Web and does the obvious Google Search: How to cook beets. As always, four billion links popped up, and I checked out several. I learned, among other things that there is such a thing as beet cake, which I may or may not look into making at some point, and I found about fifty recipes for borscht alone. I haste to add that I have never actually had borscht, so I am leaning toward the recipe in this blog entry from David Seah, called Better Living Through Borscht, since he'd never had borscht either when he first made the stuff.

But back to last night's adventure. Because I'm a simple soul, after I read several recipes and how-tos, I chose How to cook beets from ehow.com as the base recipe, since it looked simple and I like beets in general so didn't expect to need to cover up the taste with anything else. Cooking beets this way, just baking/roasting them in the oven, is easy peasy and doesn't take all that long. You just wash and clean the beets, sip off tops and tails (you can reserve the tops to have later with other veggies, they say), stick the in a pan with some water for steam, cover the pain with foil, and roast at 450°F or Gas Mark 8 (converstion information from OnlineConversion.com until they're easily pierced with a knife, between 30-45 minutes. Our beets took 35 minutes. When the beets are done, take the skins off under running water. This is incredibly easy: I used a knife to slice off the tops and bottoms, and under cool running water, the skins just slid away-- and the beets were still steaming hot on the inside!

I served them up with chicken breasts panfried in butter and garlic, a good frozen Mediterranean vegetable selection, and Thai jasmine rice. I think it all turned out pretty well.

Comments

[satyrblade.livejournal.com]

Jitterbug Perfume is one of my all-time favorite books. :)

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Mine too, obviously. I love Tom Robbins' work in general. My favourite of his books is Still Life With Woodpecker, and Jitterbug Perfume is a close, very close second.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Our organic veg supplier has a very good web site, with descriptions of every vegetabe and how to cook them, plus recipes.

http://www.rivernene.co.uk/index.php?

And yes, I too have been learning about beets. Beet soup is good, though what I produced wasn't borscht.

Tonight I'm trying out their recipe for fennel&leek bake, since the box supplied both fennel and leeks, and while I know what to do with a leek, I had no idea about fennel.

The concept of celery by the pound, though, still leaves me somewhat baffled.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Thank you: that link led me to Riverford, (http://www.riverford.co.uk/) which are part of the same collective and deliver to our area. :) I might very well try them out if we continue to use more and more organic veggies.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I'll be interested to see how their prices compare with Tescos. I hadn't realised they did organic boxes, and I don't usually get delivery from supermarkets. Easier, for me, to pop in on the way home and see what's on the cheap :)

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Tesco's organic boxes are supplied by Fenland Organics, (http://fenland-organics.co.uk/index.php) and the box they offer is Fenland's Medium Box, at £9.95. Their website doesn't provide another way to buy the boxes, so I'm assuming they sell exclusively to Tesco-- which would make sense given the potential volume they'd have to provide.

[mdlbear]

I've never been all that fond of beets, except in borscht. Decades ago I found a recipe in the little flier that came with a power bill; it involved three pounds of beef roast, a dozen beets, six peppercorns, two bay leaves, several parsnips, and two heads of cabbage among other things. It has since vanished, but the current version, from a Russian cookbook titled "Please to the table", is broadly similar.

(I expect the recipe for borscht is a lot like the definition of filk -- ask two Russian cooks and you'll get six different versions.)

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

A coworker from several jobs back who had some part of her ancestry somewhere in eastern Europe insisted that "borscht" just means "soup" and does not imply beets at all. She made vegetable soup with no beets that she insisted was a folk recipe for borscht. So the universe of borscht may be even wider than you thought, since all of the different forms with beets are found in the "beet borsht" corner.

[jhayman.livejournal.com]

The traditional southern Ontario approach to beets. At least my grandmother got it from her grandmother, which makes it about 200 hundred years old.

Boil them with one inch of stems, and the skins on, until fork tender. It takes a while (about an hour depending on the size). Lots of beet juice in the water!

Drain and allow to cool a little, unless you're a masochist.

Peel under cool running water (because you probably won't wait until they're actually cool).

Chop coarsely or dice.

Add butter and salt and pepper. The pepper is important.

Serve hot.

[highstone.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, Beets and Mangel-Wurzels, a rich source of myth and story, there was a series of children's books I recall fondly about a scarecrow that comes to life by the name of Worzel Gummidge, (his face was carved from one of these vegetables).

There is a body of old folk belief that claims the beet was an intermediate stage in the life cycle of insects: the bees shedding their wings, hibernating as beets, then emerging in the spring as beetles. The sequence of Bee, Beet and Beetle is still a staple, often emerging from the undergrowth of old English wordplay and a real return to the roots of our culture.

[roaming.livejournal.com]

Oh yum. Great dinner. I love beets. My mother told me when I was a baby I went through a period where beets were the ONLY thing I would eat. I'll try roasting them.

The only thing that keeps me from doing that "surprise, what's fresh in the box this week?!" thing is that I don't like having to figure out what to do with, say, fenugreek. I don't like cooking, I cook maybe four things over and over, and I'm afraid I'd just waste whatever I had no clue what to do with or didn't like. Brussles sprouts are the Devil's workshop, not beets!

[janciega.livejournal.com]

I came to mangel-wurzels via P.G. Wodehouse. They show up in some of his (I think) pig books. I always thought it was a wonderul name for a vegetable.

Me, I heart pickled beets. But I've never had borscht. I might like it.